Chou Shu-yi gave a riveting performance in last week’s ‘About Living’

Chou Shu-yi performed his latest solo production at the Shuiyuan Theater in Taipei last weekend.

Photo courtesy of Shu-yi & Dancers

I kept thinking about Sandra Bullock’s new movie Gravity while watching dancer-choreographer Chou Shu-yi’s (周書毅) show About Living (關於活著這一件事) at the Shuiyuan Theater in Gungguan on Saturday night. Which was strange, because one, I haven’t even seen the movie, only heard about it. Two, it wasn’t as if Chou’s piece wasn’t gripping.

Bullock reportedly is fighting for her life in the movie, which is set against a Technicolor backdrop of Earth. In his piece, Chou appears to be dancing for his life on a bare set with a black backdrop. In both cases, it is an intensely personal experience — one person alone in a vast void — and it is not an experience you would wish on anyone else. In Chou’s world, staying alive appears to be a never-ending struggle.

About Living is an expanded version of the 30-minute solo that Chou performed at last year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival and took to Seoul and New York this year. He had been invited by the festival at the end of 2011 to create a work for its Asia Pacific Dance Platform and decided to build upon his short solo Start With the Body, which premiered in 2007, in which a table lamp played a crucial role.

A 30-minute solo is hard enough to sustain, so going into the theater you have to question how one artist can keep the audience’s attention for 70 minutes, even if he is a wonderful dancer to watch.

But Chou manages it. With more than a little help from friends, it turns out. The Chinese subtitle for the work is “The Sparkling Conversation of Dance Poet &Visual Artists,” and Chou’s collaborators were Chou Tung-yen (周東彥) as director and video designer, visual artist Wang Chung-kun (王仲?), lighting designer Kao I-hua (高一華), composer and sound designer Wang Yu-jun (王榆鈞) and costume designer Lin Ching-ju (林璟如).

Wang Yu-jun provided Chou with silence, electronic rumblings akin to those made by spaceship engines in sci-fi movies, shuffling paper sounds and some beautiful piano segments. Wang Chung-kun created the lamps that were used by Kao to such effect: Each looks like half a giant light bulb, with a silver lining and the outside shell painted black.

However, it was really Kao’s lighting that not only set the mood and created the space, but was almost another character in the story. The frequent shifts between degrees of light, depths of deepest black and Chou’s shifting body were captivating.

About Living is divided into several segments. Chou first appears, striding onto the floor from behind the audience, barefooted and clad in black pants and sweater. For a few minutes he paces, rolls or flails along the floor in silence. After a blackout, he reappears, shod, with his black sweater exchanged for a gray one and a buttoned-up black coat. He seats himself before a black wall on which he chalks his outline. By the time he has tipped his chair over, the scrawled lines look like the echoes of movement. Another, longer blackout is filled with the sounds (and vibrations) of Chou pacing back and forth in front of the audience or moving up and down the stairs.

However, the bulk of the work consists of Chou dancing with one of more of the lamps. Sometimes only his hands can be seen; sometimes his whole body is moving frenetically through the void of space, sometimes he appears to be desperately reaching out for a connection with something, anything. The tension builds incrementally with each segment.